Authoring a PhD

material to write and just ponder fora bit how much, what kind, in what order. A big book thesis is a particularly fraught context in which to set out to write what is good or true before putting some numbers in the frame. In the first place universities now impose some important legal restrictions on what your doctoral dissertation can look like. In the past many people overwrote big book theses, greatly prolonging the time spent on them and creating long tomes that were excessively onerous to get examined. Nowadays any responsible university will limit the maximum time that you can spend on a PhD – usually allowing from five to eight years of full-time study, but more pro rata for part-time students. If the thought of (say) a six-year-long project makes you shudder, as it should, do not be fooled into thinking that this limit is purely notional. Every year there will be people who come up to the limit and some who overrun it.
Just as no one should goon and on as a permanent student,
so doctoral theses are now normally limited to a maximum length, which may vary a little from one university or discipline to another. In Europe and Britain where the big book’
thesis remains predominant in soft disciplines, the upper limit can be safely thought of as 100,000 words – which is about pages of A paper typed double-spaced. One A page is about words, so that 1000 (or K) words cover three pages.
(Obviously you should check the specific regulations applying to your discipline at your university and adjust my advice hereto fit well inside your formal limit if it is less than K words.)
You must take this constraint seriously from the start and make sure that you do not overwrite it. If you work away on your chapters in isolation, one at a time, it is very easy for hardworking people to write 125,000 or 150,000 (even words of text without appreciating how the numbers are stacking up. At a late stage in your research to realize that you have percent or 50 percent more text than you need or can submit is a very great shock. It can take weeks or months of painstaking work to make cuts of this magnitude in a complex text. And cutting out whole chapters at a late stage can be almost equally disruptive.
In fact the danger of overwriting is so acute that you need to make sure you come in well within the formal limit. A useful
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general rule is to produce a main text that is no more than four-fifths of the permitted length. A formal words target includes everything – all footnotes or endnotes, all appendices,
data tables, figures and diagrams. The only thing normally excluded is the bibliography – an exhaustive alphabetical listing of every book, paper, document or other source cited, which every thesis must have in its closing pages. To be on the safe side, therefore, write no more than 80 percent of the permitted number of words in your main text. An overall thesis constraint of 100,000 words means that your main chapters should not exceed 80,000 words. The word difference here partly gives you some space for the notes, appendices and other supplementary materials. It also includes an insurance margin of around 10,000 words in case some of your chapters prove stubbornly longer than planned.
In terms of what happens to your research after it is finished,
a main text of 80,000 words is also a lot better. At this length your thesis maybe potentially publishable in cut-down form as a book, while one at the legal limit will be far too big (see
Chapter 9). The average academic book is around 70,000 words long, and the closer you write to that kind of figure the less revising work will be entailed in converting your thesis into a monograph. Cutting (say) 100,000 words down to this length may not seem too difficult a task. In fact, it means losing a third of your work, and a cut of this magnitude could take several months work to achieve.
There are not usually formal rules about the minimum length fora doctoral thesis. But informal lower limits often do apply.
Where universities follow the big book thesis model, then academics generally interpret regulations specifying that a doctorate must make a substantive contribution to knowledge to mean a pretty substantial tome. The one exception is dissertations using some condensed form of expression, such as mathematical exposition or a very formal, technical way of expressing arguments. But in these disciplines big book theses are now rarely used and shorter papers model dissertations are anyway the norm. Another consideration is that most universities in Europe and North America have a second-tier postgraduate thesis qualification below the PhD level, for which candidates do not need to undertake original research and AUTHORING AP H D

which has a lower maximum word limit. In the UK, for instance,
this non-doctoral research degree is called an M.Phil. (Master of
Philosophy) and it requires people to write a satisfactorily presented thesis of no more than 60,000 words on a worthwhile topic. So there is a danger that PhD examiners presented with a short thesis of say 55,000 words may feel that it is too insubstantial to qualify for the doctorate, and perhaps operates more at the M.Phil. level. Wherever such second-tier research degrees exist, doctoral students not doing mathematical or formal work are well advised to write more text than the upper limit for the lower degree requirement. Your thesis should always look and feel like a doctorate to the examiners.
Once you have set the length of your main text, ideally at words, you need to cut it up into chunks. A basic principle of organizing any piece of text is that it should be subdivided evenly, so far as possible, in this case into chapters.
Regular chunking up of text fosters consistent expectations amongst readers they know in advance how long chapters are.
In addition, regular divisions always look better organized and controlled. To determine the number of subdivisions needed,
bear in mind that a chapter has a practical maximum length of around 10,000 words. Chapters more extended than this length make it much harder for you to organize them internally and to control their argument effectively (see Chapter 4). Long chapters are also more difficult to convert into articles in academic journals, for which the optimum length is no more than to 8000 words. Conference papers should be even shorter,
around 5000 to 6000 words long. A word chapter can normally be edited down to form a decent word journal article. With a lot of surgery it is also feasible to recast most of it as a paper for an academic conference. But a chapter of words will be effectively unpublishable in either form.
At this length it will need radical rewriting if it is ever to seethe light of day.
Chapters must also be of a certain minimum length if you are to fulfil your key mission as an author and successfully manage readers expectations. A short chapter, one of less than about 6000 words, will be confusing for readers. It can easily seem insubstantial and disappointing. It may even appear as a
‘fake’ element that you have inserted on your contents page, to
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try and mask an otherwise obvious gap or unsuccessful patch in your research effort.
Of course, theses vary a great deal in how far they can be structured into similarly sized chunks. So these targets and limits are only indicative. There will be many occasions where you have to interpret them a bit flexibly. Yet it is a good idea to be very sceptical about writing chapters that are much longer or much shorter than 10,000 words. This central target length can be pushed up or down bywords either way without doing any great harm. But chapter lengths should not go lower than about 8000 words or higher than about 12,000 words, except for the most pressing and exceptional reasons. Of course, it is often hard to predict at the planning stage how long chapters will turnout in the writing. If you end up with a substantially oversized chapter, say one that is 17,000 words long, the best strategy is to split it into two new, evenly sized chapters of around 8500 words each. Do not try to struggle along trying to organize so much text as a single unit. And do not ask your readers to cope with following an argument at the original monster length.
An overall text of around 80,000 words, evenly divided into chunks averaging 10,000 (or K) words each, implies that your thesis will need around eight chapters. The K format is a very potent one. It can usefully serve as a strong benchmark against which you should measure any different chapter structure. With eight chapters your contents page will easily meet the seven is a magic number criterion seep above. Your readers can hold the whole sequence in the forefront of their attention, and so can you. But if your structure has more than or 11 chapters you will be unable to pay attention to it or envision it as a whole, and you may react by randomly forgetting chapters or losing track of the sequence. Again what is true for you as author here will also be true for readers. Give them chapters to keep in mind and you can be almost certain that the overall pattern of your argument will become less visible and harder to follow.
People often feel that the K norm is too restrictive and that they can handle many more chapters in their thesis by dividing it into parts, where each part is a set of connected chapters. For instance, a chapter thesis maybe too complex AUTHORING AP H D

to envision clearly, but the idea is that it could be more manageable if divided into three parts of five chapters each. This use of parts, simply to manage an inflation of the number of chapters, should always be avoided. Your organizing problems will not go away, anyway, because the individual chapters will still become too small and fragmented. Conspicuously brief chapters will seem bitty and short-weight to readers whether they are linked together into parts or not.
A two-tier structure of parts sitting on top of chapters can also seem attractive as away of signalling to readers that there are important continuities between chapters. For instance, it might be that chapters 1 to 4 deal with different aspects of one meta-topic, and chapters 5 to 8 are about a second, so that a two-part division will highlight this ‘meta-structure’ for readers.
Similarly, different parts may use different methodologies, or be focused on different levels or aspects (for instance, national processes versus local processes. Apart structure is more legitimate here, and may have something to recommend it in some circumstances. But a two-tier structure still requires careful management. For new authors it is a complication that is often mishandled, and so it is best avoided if possible. For instance,
you can often indicate continuities between groups of chapters more simply by referring to the links between them in their titles. Ideally then you should pursue a clean and uncomplicated K structure for your main text, without any other organizing devices above the chapter level.
So much then for the organization of the whole. But this section is also about the core of your thesis – which maybe simply defined as all those sections with high research value-added.
The core contributes to originality either by the discovery of new facts or by the exercise of independent critical power’.
This set of chapters contains all the most substantively new or different sections of your research, the ones that determine if you get a doctorate or not. Ina big book thesis not all of your doctorate can or should fall into the core. There will also be a certain irreducible amount of non-core materials, composed of:
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Lead-in material, which introduces and sets up core material for readers so that it is understandable and accessible.
Sometimes dismissively labelled as ‘throat-clearing’ stuff,
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lead-in sections or chapters always require careful management. Nonetheless they often loom much larger to students in terms of their length, and their writing and rewriting time, than their eventual role in the final thesis would justify. Readers often page through lead-in materials quite quickly, looking mainly for the beef to be found later in the core sections.
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Lead-out materials do the ‘book-closing’ role for large theses,
providing an integrating summation or restatement of what has been found, and setting it in a wider context.
When thinking about how to organize these three types of materials (lead-in, core and lead-out), it is vital that so far as possible they should form distinct blocks in this sequence, shown in Figure 3.1. They should not be split up and scattered around the thesis in little chunks. Readers must be able to clearly identify the core as a set of discrete, high value-added chapters. They should never have to search for smaller nuggets of originality dispersed in mixed chapters that also contain other kinds of material. The point of the lead-in materials is simply to frame,
highlight and lead up to the core. In particular, they should ensure that readers can appreciate the originality and the usefulness of what you have done in your central research activities.
To get a doctorate (and to do a good thesis more broadly) the size of the core matters a great deal. You must make sure that there are enough core chapters, and that they are big enough in terms of the total wordage of your thesis, to colour the whole thing as an original piece of work. My suggested rule of thumb for big book theses is that 50,000 out of the 80,000 words of main text must be core materials. That is, appreciably more AUTHORING AP H D

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